A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you have an Emulex BladeEngine 2 or 3, or an Emulex Lancer, it should work in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner’s recent commit. Emulex has 10Gb network cards, in case you were like me and not familiar with the name.
(You thought I was going to type “Sepherosa Ziehau”, didn’t you?)
Some of the links this week go pretty in-depth. Enjoy!
Back to the Future: Preserving the History of Video Games. This is right around the corner from me. The game museum is as neat as it sounds (yes, they have games out to play), but the article doesn’t mention that it’s attached to a fantastic and huge kid’s museum.
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Candy Box and A Dark Room. Both are text-only games, but they use HTML5 for animation. They start minimal, and build up – be patient; there’s a lot of gameplay in there. These minimal games fascinate me. It’s like reading a book, where it goes from just static text to an entire world being built. (somewhat via)
Your bonus unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby double-page spreads. It’s not an exaggeration to say this artwork crackles. (via I forget)
FreeBSD ports, and therefore Dragonfly dports, will drop KDE 3.5 items sometime very soon. It’s possible to continue to build them in dports, but it’s extra work. If you need them, volunteer, because otherwise they will be dropped. (An idea I fully support.)
Earlier this week, Daniel Flores posted the first-week report on his Google Summer of Code project, file compression in Hammer. He mentioned that the LZ4 algorithm he is using seems to have the best performance with repeating text data, as in logfiles. I asked for numbers, and he provided them. The important data in the results is the total compression column. It shows how many 64k blocks were able to be compressed, with that type of data.
If you have a mps(4) device (LSI Fusion-MPT 2 SAS disk controller), you may be interested in Matthew Dillon’s large commit of bugfixes from FreeBSD. Specifically, he notes that the drive gets ‘overtagged’, and performance can be greatly improved by reducing the number of tags used.
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, Netperf will now calculate Jain’s fairness index. That is a formula that is both interesting and unfamiliar to me. Not that I understand it, of course – it’s just because it has a neat name.
It looks like OpenJDK7 works in pkgsrc for DragonFly, thanks to Ryo ONODERA, and I think it’s working in dports too.
Because Sepherosa Ziehau changed mbstat, anyone on bleeding-edge DragonFly will need to rebuild world, or else netstat will become confused.
Supposedly it’s FreeBSD 9.0 under the hood on the new Playstation 4 systems. What does this mean for FreeBSD, or driver support, or BSD in general, or what you can run on that hardware? Possibly nothing other than a vague sense of superiority.
On the other hand, this BoingBoing article makes a good point about commodity hardware and its immediate utility. It’s an effective network storage device and it doesn’t even mention FreeNAS.
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their first week reports:
If any of these projects are interesting to you, or if you have any tips for these students on work they are doing, please provide feedback.
Julio Merino is not renewing his membership of the NetBSD board of directors; he wrote an extensive post as to why. I agree with some of the issues he raised; they are possible on any open source project. I don’t necessarily think the solutions he proposes are correct.
I am clearly biased on this, but I think NetBSD needs a ‘NetBSD Digest’, to talk about the changes being made and the work being done. I once asked someone experienced in dealing with volunteers how you motivate people without a paycheck, and he said “Celebrate their accomplishments”. All the BSDs could use that. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
I was going to make excuses for a low link count because of being on the road this week – but somehow I managed to find a lot to read anyway. We all win!
Your unrelated link of the week: Who you gonna call? This kills me because there was some obvious prop work and setup just to create this 7 second joke.
There’s already been some previous conversation about how much longer to support the i386 platform for DragonFly. It looks like PC-BSD will be the first ‘flavor’ of BSD to make the jump. Support for PC-BSD on i386 will be dropped after release 9.2. That includes ‘TrueOS‘, the version of PC-BSD for servers, which I did not know about until just now.
There’s support for a new timer mechanism in DragonFly 3.5, for x86_64 users: TSC. Sepherosa Ziehau added support and has described how to disable it – it’s on by default. It speeds up some very basic (and frequently used) system calls.
Whoops, I missed this when it happened, but: the freeze for pkgsrc-2013Q2 has started. That new quarterly release is anticipated for the end of the month.
The June 2013 issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the focus is Ruby. The PDF is free if you tell them your email address.
It’s possible your Internet service provider uses a non-routeable IP range (like 10.*) and occasionally your border device picks that up via DHCP by accident instead of an Internet address. If that happens to you, and you’re using DragonFly as your border gateway, it’s possible to prevent it with PF dhclient.
If you get your Hammer drive really full, a normal cleanup won’t make enough space. When that happen, use ‘hammer reblock’ in increasing increments. That works because it does cleanup in much smaller steps.
Switching terminals in X with ctrl-alt-Fx requires a not-on-by-default option. This could catch anyone used to the old behavior, so I might be doing you a favor by mentioning it.
This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post. Enjoy!
Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser. Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)